An Artist in Her Own Right: The Cinema of Agnès Varda (Preview)
by Jonathan Kirshner

At some point during her sixth decade of filmmaking, Agnès Varda was finally recognized as a prominent figure in the pantheon of contemporary filmmakers. The unexpected, widespread popularity of her extraordinary The Gleaners and I (2000), and the irresistible cinematic force of The Beaches of Agnès (2008), each of which garnered shelves of prestigious awards, invited new and comprehensive assessments of her long and distinguished career. Looking back at her remarkable body of work illustrates the extent to which Varda followed a less conventional path than most revered directors whose output more easily facilitated canonization. But such an effort also reveals unambiguously that she was an accomplished artist with a distinctive voice and vision. 

In late career, as is often the case for such artists, Varda (1928–2019) was showered with tributes, including lifetime achievement awards at the Locarno and Cannes Film Festivals, and, like Hitchcock, received an honorary (and implicitly compensatory) Academy Award for her contributions to cinema. Those contributions have now been collected in The Complete Films of Agnes Varda, The Criterion Collection’s spectacular box set of fifteen Blu-Ray discs, which brings together thirty-nine of Varda’s films, including features, documentaries, shorts, and more than seven hours of outstanding supplements, from interviews, introductions, making-ofs, tributes, and more). The box set also features a two-hundred-page book brimming with informative essays by Amy Taubin and Ginette Vincendeau, among others, and extensive liner notes by Michael Koresky.

And “Complete” this package very much is, sweeping across experimental shorts shot in the late Fifties, snippets of aborted projects from the Sixties, two inventive television commercials (1971), and five hours of peripatetic travelogues featuring the octogenarian filmmaker recording visits with artists and exhibitions from throughout the world (taken from a miniseries made for French television in 2011). Most thrillingly, this collection includes some essential obscurities that have long been beyond the reach of even the most dedicated cinephiles. Highlights among these are the truly delightful feature One Hundred and One Nights (1995)—a must see—and Nausicaa (1970), an unreleased made-for-TV feature that was suppressed by a French government wary of offending the Greek military junta.

Agnès Varda was born in Brussels in 1928 to a Belgian mother and a Greek father. The family moved to France shortly before WWII. Agnès (who legally changed her name from Arlette) graduated from the Sorbonne with a B.A. in psychology and literature. Like Stanley Kubrick (two months her junior), Varda started out professionally as a still photographer and in the early Fifties scraped together the cash to make a microbudgeted first feature. Their paths, of course, distinctly diverged from there; Varda’s inquisitive humanism would increasingly contrast with Kubrick’s often icy stare. In another notable difference from Kubrick, still photography would retain a central role in Varda’s films (and in her career more generally). Two of her short films, Ulysee (1982) and Une minute pour une image (1983) center on the analysis of photographs, but the theme is a ubiquitous one—many if not most of her productions feature photography in some way (at times emphasized in contrast to the moving image). From her short documentary Salut les Cubains (1964), structured entirely around four hundred photos she took during a visit to Cuba (Michele Piccoli provides the narration), to her last major film, Faces Places (2017), a collaboration with the French street photographer JR propelled by elaborate outdoor installations of massive large-form photos, the intersection of these two art forms is a trademark of her craft.

Varda’s movies are characterized by a number of additional recurring motifs involving the relationship between documentary and fiction, a fascination with history and memory, and an explicit if never pedantic engagement with left-leaning political themes, including the politics of the body. These in turn inform an essential feminism (or feminisms) that leaves an indelible imprint on her work. Varda is all too easily (if appropriately) branded as a trailblazing female director and a major feminist filmmaker, but such labels can obscure these other important attributes of her work. One of the singular voices of postwar French cinema, Varda was a participant in the Nouvelle Vague, and one of the central tenets of the New Wave was to challenge the distinction between “documentary” and “fiction” films (which Varda would come to routinely blur further by inserting herself into the action). André Bazin, the legendary film critic and theorist who co-founded Cahiers du cinéma insisted in one influential essay that, “Every Film is a Social Documentary.” Jacque Rivette would echo this with his observation that every movie can be understood as a documentary of its own making…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3